the time between rulers; a space between; the gap after one epoch ends and another begins; the tumultuous and exciting period after scholarly boundaries become fluid and before new academic disciplines are fully defined; the blog of New York University's Draper Program

Draper would like to congratulate our 2011-2012 Hirschhorn Award nominees and winners! The Hirschhorn is given annually to the most outstanding thesis written by one of our students during the previous year. Theses are judged on the originality of the project, the strength of the research, and the quality of the writing.

This year we had thirteen total nominees and a tie for the award! The winners were Joey McGarvey (May 2012) and Scott Kaplan (January 2012). Their thesis titles and abstracts are below.

Scott KaplanFrom an Elegant Despair to a Moral Exuberence: A Search for Utopian Feeling in Tony Kushner's Theatre of the Fabulous

Abstract:In this paper, I will be exploring the political theatre of Tony Kushner and his Theatre of the Fabulous. By breaking down the various meanings attributed to fabulousness, I will be attempting to explain an evolution in quer theatre that Kushner is actively pursuing from the Theatre of the Ridiculous to his Theatre of the Fabulous. I will argue that Kushner’s methodology for this change is related to the way in which he politicizes feeling within two of his most Brechtian plays: A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs!. In these two plays, I will examine how Kushner’s characters both indulge in a hopeless complacent feeling I will refer to as elegant despair as well as willfully and hopelessly struggle with a complicated hopeful and powerful political feeling, which I will refer to as moral exuberance. Through these two emotions, I argue that Kushner’s political theory of the fabulous becomes most apparent, and invite us to imagine a way in which our queer aesthetic can imagine and feel toward utopia.

Joey McGarveyThe Stagecoach and the Pear: The New York Fruit Festival and the Metaphors of Ninetheenth-Century American Authorship

Abstract:“The Stagecoach and the Pear” is divided into two chapters. The first takes a primarily historical approach and represents the first real exegesis of the Complimentary Fruit and Flower Festival, an event hosted by the New York Book Publishers’ Association on September 27, 1855. The event brought together seven hundred booksellers, publishers, and authors in New York City to celebrate the decade’s literary success. Significantly, as many as fifty—and probably far less—of those who attended were female authors. In this first chapter, I ask the question: Why fruit? Why did the Association’s secretary, publisher George Palmer Putnam, decide his menu would consist almost entirely of produce and pastries (and would entirely omit alcoholic beverages)? One clear answer is as an enticement to these women, who were both apprehensive about attending and phenomenal sources of profit to the publishers who could gain their trust. As I develop the macrohistorical themes of the Festival in a way that has not previously been done, I also reveal the Festival as an active site of negotiation among some of the most prominent men and women of letters at a highly charged moment in literary history. Specifically, I argue that male publishers develop a metaphor for authorship—particularly female authorship—through fruit, allowing them to treat these women as commodities.

In the largely literary second chapter, I theorize a genre of women’s writing that I call the tale of mobility. Here, I claim that the women writers invited to the Festival had begun to develop their own metaphor for authorship through periodical tales of travel and place beginning in the 1830s. This metaphor stressed experience over commodification, and suggests both women’s excitement and anxiety about authorship. In both chapters, I repeatedly draw on a previously untapped archive, the New York Public Library’s collection of over 190 response letters from authors and other literary notables invited to the Festival, preserved by Putnam in a scrapbook. These letters, I argue, reveal the dialogue, hopes, and fears inherent in the Festival—and in mid-century literary culture—in an entirely new way.

The call for the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship has just been announced by the U.S. Department of Education. For program information and application, please see the program link on the GSAS Scholarships and Fellowships website:http://www.gsas.nyu.edu/page/grad.life.fellowships

NYU Deadline: Tuesday, June 5, 2012 at 4 PM

Please upload your application electronically, and then submit your signed hard-copy original and 2 copies to the Office of Academic and Student Life, 6 Washington Square North, 2nd Floor.

You may contact Anna Antoniak (anna.antoniak[at]nyu.edu) with any questions or concerns.

Over May 11th and 12th, 2012, I attended The University of Washington’s Graduate Student Conference 2012, Acceptance in German Literary and Visual Culture, in Seattle, Washington and presented my paper, “Rubble Films on the German and International Screens.” The experience was amazing, as it was my first time presenting at a conference, and the panels covered a broad range of time periods and genres of German and international cultural products. The range of the conference proved impressive, with the notion of “acceptance” arising in many different forms, from the acceptance of a single writer or thinker into the German canon to the notion of the perception of Germany itself from without. Volker Mergenthaler, a visiting professor from the University of Marburg, delivered the Keynote Address, “Die Regeln des Spiels und das Spiel mit den Regeln: ‘Nine Eleven’ und die deutschsprachige Literatur,” (The Rules of the Game and Playing with the Rules: ‘Nine Eleven’ and German-language Literature). Professor Mergenthaler discussed the effect of 9/11 on German-speaking writers’ work and how the literary landscape changed in the years following the attacks on the Twin Towers. I presented on a panel with a student from Boston University whose paper, “Seeing the Other Germany: Western Perceptions of Identity in East German Art,” followed through lines of the abstract and the political from the post-World War I paintings of Otto Dix to, more recently, the poster for the film, Goodbye Lennin!, from the “western” perspective. My paper, “Rubble Films of the German and International Screens,” discussed how German, American, Italian, and Jewish directors dealt with guilt, complicity, and victimhood in post World War II Germany and what roles those notions played in how to re-accept Germany back to civilization after the reign of the National Socialists. The films I covered are called Trümmerfilme or Rubble Films because they take place largely amid the rubble of post war Europe, namely Berlin, and surfaced mostly between 1946 and 1949, between the end of the war and the division of Germany into the eastern and western states. My answer to the question of re-acceptance? Well, though the differences in the films gave hints as to each filmmaker’s views, it seems each one would respond with a different variation on “I don’t know,” given the complexity of the problem and the expressive possibilities of film. Draper sent out the call for papers and this was, after all, a graduate conference, so I expected a challenging, rigorous, and ultimately rewarding experience. No surprises there, but what I did not expect was the feeling of community among The University of Washington’s graduate students in their Department of Germanics that extended to the guest presenters at the conference. After the final panel had presented and the papers had been explored through a thrilling Q&A session, the organizers and presenters gathered in Seattle’s Gas Works Park, overlooking Downtown Seattle and the Space Needle, for a picnic where we discussed the weekend’s work and got to know each other. I hope Draper continues to promote The University of Washington’s Department of Germanics Graduate Student Conferences and strongly encourage other Draperites to answer these calls for papers.

From
scroll to codex, printing press to computer screen, revolutions in
technology have changed the way we receive and process information, and
even the way we think about ideas. This interdisciplinary conference
will place the transformation in print culture in a historical
framework, and will reflect upon the changing nature of text delivery
and the experience of reading.

How
is knowledge produced? What role does the book play as cultural,
material, and sacred object? What is the place of the modern library in
the electronic age? How does the field of new media studies reflect
evolving social contexts? How do we “see” graphic novels or navigate
through hypertext fiction? What questions concerning copyright and
intellectual property does the digital age raise?

Reading
is at the heart of what we do in the academy, both personally and
professionally. What is the future of your practice of reading? Please
join us for a lively discussion of how knowledge is produced and
disseminated.

We are now accepting proposals for presentations — deadline is extended to June 1. Download guidelines

The
conference will run from Thursday evening, October 18, 2012 through
Saturday noon, October 20. The pre-conference workshop will be held
Thursday, October 18. Conference banquet will be held Friday evening,
October 19. We strongly advise reserving your hotel room early to secure
the desired room/rate at The Governor Hotel, a small, historic hotel with limited rooms in each price category.

Friday, May 11, 2012

It's been another busy, productive, and exciting year for Draper's students (and alumni!), both in and out of the classroom. The long-awaited Good News Roundup is below; if you have any information you'd like to share about your activities and accomplishments, please email us at draper.program[at]nyu.edu.

April Bacon (May 2009) will be starting Adelphi University's Creative Writing MFA Program in the fall. Prior to beginning this program, she'llbe attending the NYU SCPS McGhee Division's Summer Writing Intensive in Creative Nonfiction with David Shields. This is summer program is one that April has participated in before--last summer she attended the Fiction session with Rick Moody, which she says was both "fantastic and transformative." (For more on April's fiction writing and editorial work, see her profile on in.ter.reg.num from 2010 here.)

In April 2012, Emily Colucci (May 2011) curated Michael Alan's Living Installation 'We Are All Living Installations," a 2 show performance at the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn. The featured another Draper grad, Matthew Annis (May 2011), who was one of the show's performers, and also created a six hour soundtrack for the project, featuring collaborations with bands around the world from The Boredoms to Jello Biafra to Geneva Jacuzzi and artists Kenny Scharf and Maripol. The show, which Emily described as "a wild and fun performance/happening" won the Brooklyn Arts Council Regrant.

After graduating from Draper in January 2009, Russell Fehr entered the Ph.D. program in History at the University of California, Riverside. Russell will advance to candidacy on May 15th and will spend the next year researching his dissertation on civic participation in urban politics during the 1920s, focusing on competing reform visions in Chicago, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit, and ethnic politics in Boston. He has received support from the Center for Ideas and Society and from the Graduate Division of the UC Riverside for this project. Russell will be returning to New York (and NYU) to complete some of his research at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives in Bobst in September.

In 2010, David Ferris co-founded 3B, a downtown Brooklyn B&B, with several friends. 3B is "a boutique bed and breakfast cooperatively owned and run by 7 young creators out of our home," and has expanded quite a bit since its opening. It has been profiled at numerous publications, and the co-owners were interviewed for The L Magazine last year (see here).

This month, Christopher Iverson will be presenting a paper at The University of Washington Germanics Graduate Student Conference 2012: Acceptance in German Literary and Visual Culture. (Draper sent out the call for papers.) The paper he will be presenting is called "Rubble Films on the German and International Screens" and discusses how a short-lived film genre, theTrümmerfilm, or Rubble Film, which was prevalent between 1946 and 1950, dealt with the ideas of victim-hood, complicity, and guilt among the German people after World War II. Chris received Draper's Travel Grant to attend this conference.

Whitney Johnson (May 2011) has started a short-term position as a Rights Assistant at HarperMedia (a division of the publisher Harper Collins). Whitney is primarily involved in e-book rights, and finds the work fascinating.

Sarah Jones' paper,"When Computers Read: Literary Analysis and Digital Technology" was published in the April/May issue of the Bulletin of American Society for Information Science and Technology. The issue focuses on digital humanities and information visualization. You can read Sarah's paper online here.

After finishing her Draper degree in January 2012, Jess Krzeminski started working as a College Counselor at Options for College in Manhattan. The job is a great fit for Jess, who explained in a profile this month on the website College Xpress, that "[a]s I was pursuing my M.A. in humanities and social thought at NYU, and was looking toward the necessary next step of applying for jobs, I could not picture myself doing anything but teaching or counseling. I realized that working with students has been my lifelong interest."

Christine Olson will be completing an internship at Villa la Pietra in Florence this summer, one of two collection management internships offered through NYU's Museum Studies department.

Rafe Posey's short story collection The Book of Broken Hymns has been named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. The book is the first that Rafe has published, although he has previously published poetry, essays, and short stories and had an essay excerpt anthologized last year. Rafe also published a short story, "Kitten Goes to Sea" in the Poydras Review in May.

The award ceremony for the Lamdba Literary Award will be in June--good luck, Rafe!

Yehudit Robinson (May 2008) is pleased to announce her engagement to Sam Daitch.

Nancy Ross published her poem "los salmones" in the most recent issue of imanhattan, the journal of NYU's MFA program in Creative Writing in Spanish. You can read her poem (and the rest of the journal) here.

Over the course of her last semester at Draper, Zeinab Saiwalla (May 2012) completed an internship at the United Nations' UN Women, Asia-Pacific Division

Whitney Walker (January 2012) recently accepted a position on The New York Times' Sales Development team where she is working on their digital media platform marketing strategies and is also responsible for coming up with creative ways for other companies to advertise with the Times, using all of their different media platforms.

Yun Emily Wang appeared with a New York-based contemporary ensemble,The Cabinet, at the annual Hartford Women's Music Festival in March 2012, and will also be performing with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn this month. See the SOB's schedule here.

Miri Young (May 2012) has recently taken up a position as Manager of Programs and Tours at Judd Foundation (New York and Texas), based in SoHo. She focuses on programming, interpretation and outreach for artist Donald Judd's residence and studio space at 101 Spring Street, which will open to the public June 2013. As one of the founding sites in the program of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 101 Spring Street is the only intact, single-use cast-iron building remaining in SoHo. The Judd Foundation’s mission is to maintain and preserve Donald Judd's permanently installed living and working spaces, libraries, and archives in New York and Marfa, Texas.

Miri says that the Judd Foundation will run tours for university groups and has an intern program, and encourages Draperites to be in touch if either of these opportunities are of interest! (She can be reached at myoung@juddfoundation.org)

The Graduate School of Arts and Science and the Institute of Fine Arts are pleased to invite nominations and applications for a specialized interdisciplinary forum for graduate students whose work addresses modes of visual representation and their products. Focused on the ways in which cultures give form to visual experience, the Forum on Forms of Seeing aims to bring together students from a wide range of graduate programs. Applications are encouraged from students who have strong historical and/or theoretical interests in images and visuality in the broadest sense, and who wish to become closely familiar with other disciplines concerned with visual representation.

Over the past few decades, many disciplines have become interested in “visuality” as a wider natural and cultural phenomenon that includes not only the traditional fine arts but imaging practices of all kinds, from cinema and popular print culture to digital reality techniques and scientific modeling. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience have taken significant interest in the concept of the visual, and relatively young disciplines such as Cinema Studies and Visual Studies or Visual Culture put visual representation at the center of their research. Art History itself has become more cognizant of the limitations of traditional medium‐bound definitions of the image, and has taken up a more fluidly‐defined visuality as one of its central problems. Reflecting the dramatic expansion of visuality as a category for scholarly inquiry, the Forum invites applications for membership from any NYU graduate program.

How images in different periods and cultures imitate, model, render, or critique the world and our visual apprehension of it, for their makers and for their viewers, will be of central interest to the Forum. This historical and comparative approach may profitably be complemented by a philosophical understanding of the image as record of, or model for, acts of seeing. The creation, dissemination, function, signification, efficacy, duration, destruction, and demise of images will be welcome topics for the Forum.

MEETING FORMAT

Membership in the Forum on Forms of Seeing will be for one academic year, commencing in September 2012 and ending in April 2013. All eight members will present and critique work in progress during monthly, moderated lunch sessions, scheduled on Fridays, from 12–3 p.m., at Washington Square and the Institute of Fine Arts. The meetings will culminate in a one‐day event at the end of the semester, showcasing the year’s presentations. Members are expected to attend every session and to participate in the end‐of‐year symposium. A stipend of $500 is distributed per semester.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

To apply for membership in the 2012‐13 Forum on Forms of Seeing, please provide a one‐page statement of your scholarly interest in visual representation and the relevance of interdisciplinary debate about visuality for your graduate work. Your application should include a current transcript (unofficial is fine), CV, and a recommendation by a NYU faculty member. Please submit your completed application electronically by end‐of‐day Wednesday, May 23 to Anna Antoniak (anna.antoniak@nyu.edu).

For more information, please visit the Forum on Forms of Seeing blog at

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Please find a reminder below about Draper's upcoming Summer Writing Workshops, offered in summer sessions one and two with Profs. Theresa MacPhail and Steven Moga.

If you plan on enrolling, please do so within the next week--courses with low initial enrollments are often cancelled over the summer.

You do not need an access code to register for the writing workshop; the class numbers you need to enroll are below.

Please contact draper.program@nyu.edu with questions.

***

Every summer, Draper offers a workshop course called "Preparation for Graduate School: SummerWriting Workshop." Although this course was originally designed for incoming graduate students, it has also been very useful to some Draper students after completing their first semesters in the program.

If you'd like to brush up your writing skills this summer, the course will be offered in both summer session one (with Prof. MacPhail) andsummer session two (with Prof. Moga). It's a pass/fail class which can be taken for two credits, or as a non-credit course (there's a flat fee of $1,000 for the non-credit section; regular tuition applies to the two credit sections). There are no access codes for Draper's summercourses, so you can just enroll directly on Albert.

Course descriptions for both Prof. MacPhail and Prof. Moga's workshops are below. Email Draper (draper.program@nyu.edu) with any questions about the course or summer registration.

***

Summer Session One: 5/21 - 6/29

SummerWriting WorkshopProf. Theresa MacPhail

Mondays, 6:00 - 8:30 PMDraper Map Room

DRAP-GA.2900

Section 001: non-credit (CLASS NUMBER: 1487)

Section 002: two credits (CLASS NUMBER: 1488)

This course introduces incoming and first-year graduate students to the practice of academic writing. We’ll cover some of the specific forms and styles that graduate students routinely encounter, including: grant proposals and prospectuses, abstracts, book and literature reviews, critical essays, and research papers. We’ll also seek to demystify the writing process by discussing some of the practical problems that writers face and breaking down the process into manageable tasks at each stage.

Because this course is a practical, hands-on workshop, it will be centered around what you write from week to week, as well as in-classwriting activities including peer review, feedback, editing, and discussion. Readings will consist of short articles on particular aspects ofwriting, and examples of the genres we are working with.

Aside from the writing you produce during the course, you should also have a longer paper that you would like to revise, either something in progress or previously written for another course. It doesn’t have to be a fully polished piece but it should have a recognizable shape with introduction, body and conclusion fleshed out. In case you do not have a suitable paper available, we can make other arrangements.

Summer Session Two: 7/2 - 8/10

SummerWriting WorkshopProf. Steven Moga

Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:30 PMDraper Map Room

DRAP-GA.2900

Section 003: non-credit (CLASS NUMBER 1489)

Section 004: two credits (CLASS NUMBER 1490)

This course focuses on academic writing in the form of short essays and research papers. Designed as a workshop, it aims to teach students practical skills for success in graduate school through weekly writing assignments, in-class writing and editing exercises, readings about academic writing, and discussion. Topics include style and tone in academic argument, writing with clarity and sophistication, the use of jargon and technical language, time management and the term paper, and the writing process.

The rapid changes currently experienced in the different
spheres of contemporary life are loosely addressed by the term “globalization.”

How do we theorize these changes? And perhaps more
importantly, while these changes are often considered a global phenomenon, are
they not also shaped by a set of discourses? This calls for a reconsideration
of key terms such as “domination” and “hegemony”, as well as of the various
intellectual/cultural positions associated with them. In particular, we aim to
reconsider the cultural sphere as a globalized phenomenon in which cultural
products circulate on a worldwide scale, and as a sphere where “global”
experiences are articulated.

The conference will attempt to explore some of the many
aspects of this globalized view of culture, as well as other aspects of global
lives, economical, political or other. We seek to engage scholars from a wide
range of disciplines to bring together the different theories and perspectives of
globalization in order to articulate the diverse experiences of living in a
globalized world.

Submission and acceptance to the conference is based on blind
peer review of a 250-300 word abstract. Panels and non-traditional
presentations will also be considered. Graduate students interested in
submitting should email an abstract, paper title, 2-3 sentence bio, affiliation
and contact information to catgradconf@gmail.comby June 1, 2012.
Presenters will be informed by August 1,
2012.

We are pleased to congratulate Christopher Iverson, the most recent
recipient of a Draper Travel Grant, on his award! Christopher will use
the grant to attend the University of Washington's conference
"Acceptance in German Literary and Visual Culture," where he will be
presenting his paper Rubble Films of the European and American Screens later this month.

A friendly reminder to all students that five Draper Travel Grants are awarded per academic
year and that applications are accepted during five different periods.
The next submission deadline will be June 30th. Currently matriculated Draper students who
will be delivering papers or posters at scholarly conferences should
fill out and deliver the necessary forms to the Draper office or via email to draper.program@nyu.edu
by 5:00 pm, 6/30. The application is available through our website at http://draper.fas.nyu.edu/object/draper.forms. Along with the completed application, please
submit confirmation that a conference has accepted the paper or project
for presentation.
Again, we congratulate Mr. Iverson and wish him the best of luck on his presentation!

Nicholaus Gutierrez (alumnus, Jan. 2012) will start at Berkeley's Rhetoric program in the fall.

Lee Huttner was accepted to the English program at Northwestern

Craig Knox will start his doctoral work at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He was awarded four years of full funding.

Sarah Catherine Latanyshyn was accepted to the Ethnomusicology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the musicology program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She will attend UCSB with a four year Doctoral Scholars Fellowship

Ji Hyun Lee (alumna, 2010) was accepted to the English programs at Northeastern (with the University Excellence Fellowship), SUNY Stony Brook (with the Graduate Council Fellowship), and Cornell (with funding). Ji Hyun will attend Cornell in the fall where she is looking forward to theopportunity to study trauma with Cathy Caruth.

Daniel Libatique will attend Boston University's Classics program in the fall.

Eric Longfellow was accepted to the English Studies and Creative Writing program at Illinois State University.

Pamela Nogales will start at NYU'sAmerican History program in the fall.

William Paris (alumnus, Jan. 2012) was accepted to the Philosophy program at the University of Pennsylvania

Yun Emily Wang was accepted to the Ethnomusicology programs at Memorial University and the University of Toronto, as well as the Humanities program atConcordia University. She will start at the University of Toronto in the fall.

Lindsey Whitmore was accepted to the Women's and Gender Studies program at Rutgers and the Cultural Studies program at SUNY Stony Brook. She will start at Rutgers in the fall.